President Donald Trump said Friday that he suspects he’ll “very quickly” revoke the security clearance of Bruce Ohr, a Justice Department official whose wife worked for the firm involved in producing a dossier on Trump’s ties to Russia.
His comments came two days after he yanked the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennan, saying he had to do “something” about the “rigged” federal probe of Russian election interference.
Critics have cast it as an act of political vengeance.
On Thursday by a joint letter from 15 former senior intelligence officials called Trump’s action “ill-considered and unprecedented.” They said it “has nothing to do with who should and should not hold security clearances — and everything to do with an attempt to stifle free speech.”
Then on Friday, 60 former CIA officials issued their own statement, joining a chorus of opposition from the intelligence community to Trump’s decisions to threaten to or actually pull clearances. (Seattle Times)
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While a commander (the Commander in Chief) has the authority to suspend someone's security clearance (suspend access), doing so without a clear and specific statement of a violation defined in the 13 Adjudicative Guidelines is inappropriate.
Suspending a security clearance 'as a result of an on-going investigation' without providing specific allegations of wrong-doing and evidence to support those allegations smacks of abuse of authority and perhaps official misconduct on the part of the commander issuing the suspension.
A person whose security clearance (access) is suspended must be afforded the opportunity to explain, refute, or mitigate the allegations made against him/her at the time of the suspension. If that opportunity is not provided it strongly indicates that the suspension was "political vengeance" and retaliation.
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